Cloudflare being shady?

An interesting article - containing four links to similar HackerNews shared experiences:

https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

Corporations being corporate, basically, and asking for a huge amount of money in 24 hours or shutting a website down. A quote from the article:

We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to register their domains with the Cloudflare DNS/CDN/Firewall provider might want to reconsider - as that might increase the time needed to get back on line when Cloudflare pulls the rug.

BikeGremlin websites and forum are using Cloudflare. I would even say that they heavily rely on the Cloudflare's free service (the Cloudflare Pro and APO didn't work very well for me). However:

• Domain registration is handled by a separate company (Porkbun - my review), with only nameservers pointed to Cloudflare from there. So I would not see days of downtime while domains are being transferred to another domain registrar, in case Cloudflare decides to "pull the rug."
• Web hosting is done by a separate company (MDDHosting - my review), that offers good performance and very good protection should I need to get rid of the Cloudflare's proxy service.
• My DNS and other relevant settings are backed up, so while I would need to spend an hour copy/pasting those to a different platform (hosting provider's DNS setup or a different third party), that is still a lot better than re-configuring all the DNS entries, especially the email-related DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
• I use layered security, not relying on Cloudflare's Zero Trust alone, should that "go away" suddenly.

All that having been said, Cloudflare does offer an awesome service at zero cost (for now, for me, and my traffic), and it would be more complicated, less fast, less secure, and more expensive to replace it should it decide to pull the rug on me.

Unfortunatelly, there is nothing one can do when these huge big brothers decide to stop being nice (how Google squashed my website). That's capitalism working as intended.

Relja

P.S.
The relevant discussion on this on the LowEndSpirit forum:
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/7869/cloudflare-being-shady/p1